Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire

Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is an extraordinary work of fiction and at points probably the most fun I’ve had reading in a long while. It is also a great challenge to your blogger qua blogger. Should you take a (spoiling) glance at Wikipedia you would see that some of the major critical questions surrounding the work concern whether half of the cast of characters even exist within its world, or whether they are instead the ravings of the probable madman who is our narrator. When I write about literature I try to grasp onto what is solid – I focus, as this blog’s name suggests, upon stories. Here, therefore, I have my work cut out for me with all this confusion. Or I would, if the work did not at the same time contain such a holistic richness, where language, form, structure, and apparent plot, work together to deliver ideas and thoughts with the maximum impact, that there remains plenty to say.

With Pale Fire the challenge of writing about it comes not only from an atmosphere of uncertainty, but also from the very structure of the work. I write long-ish blog posts, but I try to spare readers whole monographs. Yet Pale Fire contains multitudes. It is not only a poem of 999 lines in rhyming couplets by a murdered author. It is also accompanied by foreword and commentary and index by another man, one who claims to be friends with the author, and whose commentary, besides being some five times the length of the author’s work, also seems to be as much an adventure story as attempt at close analysis. It is a confession, a tale of daring escape, and an academic satire, even before we try to think about its relation to the poem itself.

Even working out how to read the book is a choice and challenge. In the “Foreword”, Charles Kinbote, our guide and colleague of the deceased poet John Shade at an American university, describes how we are best to read Pale Fire. First, he tells us, we read his commentary, and only then do we read the poem with the notes, before we finally read the notes a third time on their own again. I ignored this bizarre suggestion and read the poem first, then put the book down for a month, then read the poem again, before reading the commentary in isolation afterwards. Such an approach I think makes sense, because in essence Pale Fire is two stories in contention – the poem and Shade’s narration fight the tale and narration of Kinbote in his critical apparatus, where Kinbote is actively trying to control our understanding of the former.

Here I’ll begin with the poem, then the commentary, and try to suggest how they fit together.

Poem

Pale Fire is a poem of 999 lines, broken into a mirrored four-canto structure (166-334-334-165) with the last line remaining unwritten at the time of John Shade’s murder. It is rhymed throughout in heroic couplets (AABB etc, iambic pentameter), which provides an ironic contrast with the relative mundanity of its autobiographical contents. (Here I should note that I am assuming Shade is telling the truth, that his narrator is himself, rather than some distanced figure, which is not really something one is normally supposed to do with poems these days). John Shade describes topics like his early life, his family and his views on life after death. At its centre lie his love for his wife and his grief over his daughter’s death by suicide.

Probably the most sensible critical approach to the book as a whole is to see it as showing the interplay of reflection and masking, self and other. Hence the two sides of the work, Shade and Kinbote, the mirrored structure of the poem, and plenty besides. In the poem, Shade shows more ambivalence to the topic of reflection and deception than his editor. “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”, the poem’s first couplet, describes the death of a bird from a false assumption regarding transparency. In trying to recover the memory of his parents, who died young, Shade can only create shadowy images that have no substance – many reflections, but not the real thing. Shade’s poem shows him holding on to a sense of the real which poetic reality disappoints, at least to begin with.

Disappointment and pessimism come across elsewhere in the poem too. Madness stalks Shade, even before we get into the “outside” world of Kinbote, such as through the figure of his Aunt Maud, who suffers from dementia and can speak, but never find the right words. The greatest cause for sadness, however, is his daughter Hazel, whose ugliness and ungainliness seem to curse her to her early doom (“no lips would share the lipstick of her smoke”), and who on the night of her death is betrayed cruelly by a date. But it is here, unlike with his parents, Shade succeeds in recreating his daughter’s life. Poetry helps him to build a parallel image to his experience of her final evening as he watches television and waits for her to come home, one where he imagines her final moments. And this allows the positive couplet in Canto 4, where “I’m reasonably sure that we survive / and that my darling somewhere is alive”.

While the poem is a place of unsatisfactory reflections, that is far from the whole story, as his eventual hope for Hazel shows. Its most moving passages are when the poet does strike out in love and successfully grasps on to his object:

And I'll turn down eternity unless
The melancholy and the tenderness
Of mortal life; the passion and the pain;
The claret taillight of that dwindling plane
Off Hesperus; your gesture of dismay
On running out of cigarettes; the way
You smile at dogs; the trail of silver slime
Snails leave on flagstones; this good ink, this rhyme,
This index card, this slender rubber band
Which always forms, when dropped, an ampersand,
Are found in Heaven by the newly dead
Stored in its strongholds through the years. 

This might, to an expert, be bad poetry. I find it moving. It’s a dance in time and reference between mundanity and the heavenly. And whereas pessimism might have lines supporting it elsewhere, here we have anything but that. It is not resignation in the face of the world – note the active verb “I’ll turn down”, and words like “passion” and “pain” which speak of emotions not blunted by the hardships of life. While Nabokov’s work is filled with irony – Shade expresses hope about waking up on the 22nd July as normal but in real life he is shot and never sees the day) – the poem, taken as Shade’s testimony, is free of this. Instead, it is connection, which indeed is the other value of the couplet structure – the iron bond of rhyme that links each line to line. Couplets might be humorous in essence, but sometimes we need them.

If I were to try to sum up the poem, then, which is difficult because as with all poetry it’s unfairly dense and could handle a much deeper analysis than what I’ve provided, I would say this: in a world of distorting and uncertain reflections and pain, through focused love towards those nearest him – his wife and daughter – Shade manages to create a work that ends with hope.

Solus Rex

The novel Pale Fire takes its name from the poem, Pale Fire, but it could easily have had another title – Solus Rex. This is the title that our commentator, Charles Kinbote, admits he would have given it. Kinbote is a larger-than-life figure, a madman in the Nabokovian mould. He is many things, and possibly none of them – a professor, an exiled king, a menace to his students and his colleagues, and an inveterate inventor of fictions. He claims to be protecting Shade’s legacy by publishing his poem, but then admits that Shade’s wife Sybil refuses to answer his letters, and he speaks of himself as of a man in flight from dangerous pursuers – he refuses to go to a library to check anything and is writing his notes in a remote log cabin.

His commentary is as multiple as he is. The one thing it is not is good academic criticism. Kinbote states the obvious and calls it analysis with the same brazenness as a certain blogger; at other times he simply refuses to do his job altogether – “my readers must do their own research” he declares. His index cheerily damns his colleagues by mentioning them in their connection with Shade and then noting “Not in the index” to show they aren’t worth any further consideration. In places his interpretations are so bizarrely off the mark that I found myself writing things like “no, I don’t think so”, in the margins. Towards the end of the book, faced with a momentary upsurge of academic integrity, he admits that a fair few of Shade’s “discarded drafts” were lines he simply made up. It would be a shock, except that his attempts don’t even manage to mimic the iambic pentameter correctly. No great poet, this editor.

All this, however, is secondary to the real part of the commentary – Kinbote’s description of his own life as exiled king of the north-European country of Zembla. More than academic score-setting, this is the reason for his notes’ existence. Kinbote believed that, over the course of his short “friendship” with Shade, he had convinced him to write this story as his poem. Shocked to discover that “Pale Fire” has nothing to do with this, Kinbote first attempts analytical pirouettes to find connections, then abandons the attempt, leaving the commentary an almost-standalone narrative of the life of Charles “the Beloved” of Zembla, from boyhood sexual escapades to the revolution that forces him to undertake a daring escape into exile. How much of any of this is true is the big academic question, indeed whether Zembla exists within the story to begin with.

Throughout, there are clues towards deeper truths, hints scattered among the pages. Kinbote is a lover of masks and subterfuge, unlike Shade – indeed, “King Charles” fled Zembla with the help of a disguise. Whereas in the poem, Shade tries to define the truths of his life among the many reflections and distortions of it, Kinbote’s section almost seems an attempt at the opposite – a befuddling of the truth which, somehow, still pokes out here and there. The reason why this works is that Kinbote has a certain amount of conscience, as mentioned above. He would prefer to omit than to lie outright, and sometimes he fails to omit things. Hence the occasional allusions to sexual misbehaviour, such as “his penetrating into the bedroom where his friend sat and shaved in the tub”, which is an index entry under his own name. Hence also the hints that his friendship with the Shades is not exactly all he claims it is. For example, regarding dinner parties he notes that “of the dozen or so invitations that I extended, the Shades accepted just three”. Then there is his reported speech to Sybil on one occasion, which begins as a benign monologue, only to be increasingly sullied with phrases like “do not interrupt me”, or “let me speak”, all within one long run-on sentence, as if he hopes we will not notice.

The two together

“Pale Fire”, the poem, has been published separately. The commentary, to a certain extent, could be too. What then, is the purpose of their cohabitation in one book, beyond merely providing the scaffolding for some academic satire? The treatment of grief within the work is what led me onto my own answer. Shade and his wife grieve the loss of their daughter. Those other poems of Shade’s which Kinbote quotes in the commentary all mourn for her too, directly or less so. His long poem itself is, at its heart, a working out of that grief, a transition from pessimism to hope for the future.

Kinbote’s relation to grief is entirely different. The high point of Shade’s grief within the poem he criticises as stylistically weak (“too laboured and too long”), then he steals the manuscript, convincing a weeping Sybil Shade on the day of her husband’s death that he ought to be the one to edit and publish his last poem.

Stepping back, then, we have two kinds of interaction. Kinbote scorns reality and is obsessive, sexually so even, about his favourite poet. The repeated suggestion regarding his past loves is that he has used and discarded them and that at no point has consent been anywhere in his thoughts. His relation to his colleagues is inimical – he seeks to crush or manipulate them, as he ultimately seeks to do to Shade himself by forcing him to write a poem about his (probably invented) past as a king. For Kinbote, simply, people don’t really exist.

Shade comes across as someone who is the opposite. His love for his wife and daughter are fundamentally unself-centred. His relationship with Kinbote, what we can read of it anyway, seems to be further evidence of a kindness and tolerance that Kinbote lacks. At one point Kinbote lets himself in to the Shades’ abode through a door left ajar, causing Shade to utter “an unprintable oath”. Shade had (apparently) mistakenly thought Kinbote was a travelling salesman. But still the Shades invite him to sit down and have a cup of tea. The walks the two men take, likewise, seem more like the poet is humouring the annoying (and lonely) foreigner Kinbote, than truly forming the deep friendship with him which Kinbote claims for himself.

In other words, the book is contrast of isolation versus connecting – the binding couplets placed against the commentary which is largely disconnected from the commented. This is perhaps the work’s most moral message, one that brings together all of its elements – the different forms, the trickery and disguises, the reflection. One life succeeds, another fails – it’s simply the case that the wrong man died. Nabokov liked his irony, of course. I have also failed to give any indication of how funny this book is. There’s not just the fun of puzzling it all out, but actual belly-laugh humour here. I think that’s why Pale Fire is so impressive. While I did find the Zembla story tedious at times, the novel as a whole is peerlessly readable. It’s funny, it’s allusive, it’s thoughtful, it’s moral. It’s basically impossible to read without finding at least one moment you can celebrate.

In short, it’s one of those books that is truly inspirational. It is quite simply a reminder of the heights that truly the best literary works can reach.  

Body and Soul – David Szalay’s Flesh 

Flesh, the Booker-prize-winning novel by the British-Hungarian author David Szalay, is many things. So is its central figure, the Hungarian István, whose rags-to-riches-and-back tale covers more ground than many of us can expect to experience in our own lives, from soldiery in Iraq to bouncing at nightclubs in London and finally hobnobbing with politicians over billion-pound property developments. The mere accumulation of believably rendered scenes, however, is not what makes this interesting as fiction. Instead, it is Flesh’s rendering itself that is exciting. Through a bare, pared-down style, which is especially visible in its shockingly direct dialogue, the novel is a brilliant example of saying without stating and showing without quite telling.

 The work’s title sets out its thematic scope right from the get-go. István is a man who appears to be someone wholly devoid of interiority or reflection – all body, no mind. He spends much of the book in a kind of passive role – things happen to him. Those things, often as not, involve sex. Whether that’s his sexual initiation at the hands of an older woman or the affair with his boss’s wife that sets off his rise to the upper reaches of British polite society, interlocking bodies are almost always involved. Despite his taciturnity and passivity, István succeeds in life. At least to a point. This result raises questions about whether such things as interiority and reflection are really necessary and has allowed some commentators on the novel to turn it into a kind of guide to practical stoicism.  

Such a view is wrongheaded. If the novel shows that a man can reach the top of the world without interiority or reflection, that fact reflects poorly upon that world. So much is possible, certainly, except what truly matters – mainly, in this case, love. The view also downplays those little, quietly articulated, developments within the novel, that show István changing even as the world does not. The growth of his imagination and empathy, for example, and his attempts to move from passivity into a certain kind of activity. That none of this is ultimately rewarded says nothing against him. Instead, after so much time spent meditating on flesh, we are left wondering how the world and people might change if we wanted to value mind also.  

Plot  

István comes from relative anonymity in small-town Hungary and ends up, briefly, at the top of British polite society. During his rise, two things stand out: the role of chance, and that of his own relative passivity. An older woman begins his introduction to sex as a teenager, less with his consent, than with his compliance. When the affair is discovered, István and the woman’s husband fight, with the young man accidentally killing the older in a brawl. After his release from a young offender’s institute, István loafs. An attempt at intimacy with his uncle’s stepdaughter leads to him being rebuffed, but it plants the idea of joining the army in him. After a tour in Iraq and therapy for PTSD, he becomes a bouncer in the UK, where one night he comes across a man being attacked by a mugger. István doesn’t rescue him so much as make it impossible for the mugging to continue by crying out. Nevertheless, it’s enough.  

The man saved, to István’s good fortune, runs a bodyguard service. After training, István receives as his clients a very wealthy Scandinavian couple, the Nymans, who divide their time between London and the countryside. The much-younger wife, Helen, begins an affair with István, which comes into the open after her husband’s death from cancer. For a few years, they enjoy their life openly. But her son from her marriage, Thomas, is destined to inherit everything from his father upon reaching the age of twenty-five. Thus István’s stint at the top becomes time-limited. The novel sketches out the shape of its arc early enough, even if the exact shape, the clicking together of the pieces of the decline, retains its capacity to surprise.  

Chance and Passivity 

The role of chance is so important within the novel because of István’s essential passivity, or at best reactivity. The older woman begins their affair by unexpectedly asking if she can kiss him. As for the heroism that fends off the mugger late at night, it’s described like this:  

“Help,” a voice says.  

The voice sounds strangely normal, like someone just neutrally saying the word. 

Maybe it’s for that reason that he does nothing for a second or two. 

Then he starts to move towards it, past the weakly lit display windows of the bookshop. 

“Hey!” he shouts. 

Which seems to be enough. 

At key moments like these, István’s actions have been prompted by external stimuli, and always with delays, as if he is a simple, slow, organism. His PTSD centres upon his failure to rescue a friend from a burning military vehicle in time – for too long, he simply watched the flames in shock, he thinks. Even his language is reactive: “Sure, thanks.” “Okay.” I remember making a mental note when I first saw a sentence of dialogue from István which required a second line in the book – it was so unexpected.  

Yet in spite of this essential reactivity, István’s ascent is meteoric. As a bouncer, then later as a bodyguard, he is in roles where his passivity and silence become virtues. Even with the women who fall for him, such as Helen Nyman, it seems that his reticence is taken by them as a sign that he can be trusted for a clandestine affair. Later, once he moves into British polite society, his lack of personality means that he can easily “fit in.” His interests, such as they eventually are, appear to be expensive cars and watches. He does not rock the boat. He barely makes it bob, stepping in.  

The World Attained 

By all of this I read Flesh as having a clear moral implication. If so much of our world is achievable without much thinking or conscious action, what does that say about the value of our world?  

István gets to his position without friends of any sort, without any extended dialogue. He is addicted to cigarettes, then later adds alcoholism, while Helen’s son Thomas eventually has develops a heroin addiction. The only changes for István between rags and riches is the quantity and brand of what he’s smoking. At one point, after Iraq, in one of the novel’s most memorable moments, we learn about the development of his habit: 

When he went to Iraq he smoked ten to twenty cigarettes a day. 

Now it’s forty. 

There is something gleeful about the narration here, a kind of revelling in self-destruction. It’s shocking to me because normally in our stories we expect our characters to be moderately rational, to want what’s best for them, to grow in positive directions. Instead, here, Szalay has István only get worse. And we could not expect for things to be otherwise, or hope for that, because István lacks the kind of interiority that might make such a thing possible. Yet in spite of that he still “grows” socially and financially, time and again. 

The sex of the novel ranges from exploitative to hateful, and only rarely does it seem loving or a meeting of two minds and bodies in mutual recognition and respect. But that it happens over and over, especially within the contexts of infidelity, also becomes an argument of sorts. The world, as it comes to István at least, is full of unhappy people, trapped in unhappy situations. He can give them sex, but it is hard to say if he can achieve anything more. The material success of the Nymans has clearly not saved them, in any serious way, from the unhappiness that seems to afflict most of the characters of Flesh. The novel’s willingness to indicate a change in material conditions, especially through brand names for cars, watches, and cigarettes, is contrasted with this lack of any kind of change to the people consuming them – still sad, whether they know it or not.  

We can also think about the dialogue again in connection with this world-critical angle. Taking a page at random, here’s a snatch of dialogue between Helen Nyman and her sister-in-law Mathilde, while Helen’s husband is in the hospital for cancer treatment: 

“And how are you?” Mathilde asks her. “Are you okay?” 

“Yes I’m okay.” 

“You need to look after yourself.” 

“I know.” 

“You mustn’t let yourself go.” 

“I know,” Helen says. 

This dialogue is above all really strange. It is the right words, perhaps even the real words, but on the page it’s startling, as is all of the dialogue of Flesh. There is a distinct unliterariness to it – instead of flowing, the end of each line is like a cliff edge we must carefully lower ourselves down on to reach the beginning of the next. That awkwardness is the point, of course. Here are two people not really communicating to one another. They are, like the many-jobbed István, playing roles. They are also, deliberately, consciously, not connecting. The clipped speech makes it seem that they are all acutely, painfully conscious of the possibility of being hurt and choosing to give the slightest possible opening. Even if István’s own speech lacks this sense of self-protection, it certainly contains its sibling – the self-retention. “Okay” is one of the hardest replies to find an answer for, after all.  

This dialogue relates the other topics, the sex and the material aspects of the world, by being another reminder of this world’s shallowness. Certainly these people could say more. They have, as the novel eventually reveals, more inside them. But the world as it comes to them, by and large, does not bring these things out. A bad world makes for bad dialogue, just as it makes for bad sex. Everyone here is trapped, without even the words to escape their cages.  

The World Missing

f Flesh were merely a parabola of a man’s life, without growth or change, with merely an implied judgement on the world, it would probably still be reasonably good. However, what elevates the novel is the way that it also offers an answer, or at least a hint, of what is missing, and what it looks like. These missing things are threefold – love, imagination, and goodness.  

Love is the first. Flesh is a book that is all about sex, but love is quite clearly absent, most of the time. This is further emphasised by the way that the majority of István’s sexual encounters, indeed his sexual relationships, are infidelities by the second person against their husbands. But from the beginning, with his relationship with the older woman, István is at least aware of love and its importance. He tells her he loves her and she tells him he does not know what that means. He protests that he does, but there is no evidence that this is the case. This show of emotion disturbs the woman and precipitates the end of their affair shortly thereafter. 

Love does come back onto the page until István’s relationship with Helen, half way through the book. This time it is she who confesses her love to him. He does not know how to react, and she even forbids him a response. But she brings the idea of love back into the book, so that when István has a chance to show his affection, and what she means to him, following an accident, he does it. Even if that showing is still just a restrained, pained, retreat into alcoholism, it is a sign of real emotion, however poorly managed. If the novel begins with a statement without emotion, here there is emotion without its statement. 

Imagination is important in the novel as something missing from the main world of the work. In contrast to the materiality of things – the brands, and so on, which suggest a kind of objectifying vision on the part of the characters – imagination, in the form of empathy, provides a counterpoint: a vision of a better way of thinking about other people. After István’s time in Iraq, carrying the weight of his friend’s death in combat, he keeps it to himself except when encouraged to share by therapy. He believes others could not understand. He himself cannot understand art, that legendary transferal medium for emotions, as his trip with Helen to a museum shows. And when the affair between her and him is discovered by Thomas, his response to her suggestion that he might tell his father is simply to say “I can’t imagine it.” At first glance István wholly lacks imagination, the ability to place himself in others’ shoes.  

Again, however, the matter is only a question of seeming. In the background there is therapy, and hopefully independent personal growth. By the time István has a son of his own and has to confront the realities of the boy’s growing sexual maturity, he is able to reflect, looking back into himself at that age, to compare and contrast. It has taken a book, but this is still small progress. We can also see this progress formally. Not merely in the shockingly long paragraph (average length for any other book) of reflection after István discovers a well-thumbed porn mag, but more concretely in the way that the book begins by sticking closely to István, but then expands its reach to give glimpses into the lives of other characters too, such as Helen and Thomas. I would say this is a controversial decision on Szalay’s part in terms of focus, but insofar as it fits into a framework of the novel showing a growing awareness of other people, it makes sense. 

Finally, the last thing obviously missing from the main world of the work is goodness, or positive action. Towards the book’s end, István is faced with that strangest of things to a man whose rise has been given mainly by chance – a choice. It is quite a plain one, between the full and permanent attainment of the earthly riches he has enjoyed for much of the book at the cost of a bad action, or rather continued inaction, versus a moral and “active” action which puts that attainment at risk. In this situation, István makes the latter decision. In terms of these two worlds, it means that he loses this great moneyed world and gains a smaller world, one of reflection and self-worth. He chooses, we might say, soul over mere flesh at last. 

Conclusion  

What is Flesh, in the end? A lot of things. I read it as showing our world as it is – atomised (István has no friends), materially obsessed, helpless – and showing another world, shining through the mist. Ultimately it is no mere dismissal of life. Its title might seem to set off a negative view of the body, but “Flesh” is not body. Rather, it is something less. It is only in combination with mind, and reflection, and thought, that flesh can be elevated into harmony, can become truly “body”.  

What is interesting here is the tentativeness of the work’s conclusions on this front, which has allowed some critics to see it as specifically about masculinity. (Thomas calls István an example of “primitive masculinity”, which supports this). István’s progress, his discoveries, are limited: from nearly no self-consciousness or emotional expression to just a little. If we come to the book to learn, to grow ourselves, we probably could not – we are probably already far more emotionally mature than our hero. But all growth is valuable, is a story, and for the relative rarity of this kind of story, Flesh becomes all the more worth reading.

Alan Hollinghurst – The Line of Beauty

In the interests of full disclosure I must inform you I am compromised and perhaps, on this occasion, cannot discharge my reviewing duties as honourably as I normally would. Alan Hollinghurst’s wonderful, delectable, novel, The Line of Beauty, concerns the life of a young man during the peak years of Thatcherite Britain. A period some ten years before I was even born, but one that chances of fate and birth mean I struggle to be wholly indifferent towards. I was not born a miner’s son, no. Quite the opposite – my grandfather was a very significant Conservative MP. I am tainted, I suppose, by this. By his ghostly shadow – he died when I was very small – and his books upon the wall, even as I write this now. Whether in action or reaction, this fact is a big annoying reality, one I try to avoid in life, yet ever fail to.

I know that readers here are scattered across the earth. It can be hard to understand the strength of the feelings that Margaret Thatcher earned for herself. When she died – which I do remember – it was startling to me to see so many people cursing the “witch” who now was gone. Yet many loved her, more quietly perhaps, and she repeatedly won large majorities in parliament. Whether one views her as an industry-destroying monster who robbed thousands of their jobs in the mines, or a hero for the aspiring who opened the way to middle-class property-ownership and general prosperity, her policies and personal values touched everyone in the United Kingdom, for better or worse. After a period of relative stagnation, Thatcher brought something new. The “Big Bang”, a sudden and large amount of financial deregulation in 1983, could describe the whole period – it was an explosion of change, with individuals free left to figure out the consequences and opportunities for themselves. Those who could, anyway.

Into this world steps the hero of The Line of Beauty, Nick Guest. Young, fresh out of Oxford but not particularly rich or privileged, he embodies the upward social mobility of the times. A friendship of sorts with one Toby Fedden at Oxford gives him the chance to live with Toby’s family in London while he pursues further studies in Henry James and his style. The Feddens are a family with no need for social mobility. Gerald, the father, is a newly-minted MP in 1983, while his wife Rachel brings old money and further status to his affairs. Besides Toby, there’s also a daughter, Catherine, whose depressions are carefully hidden from the outside world.

Nick lives with the Feddens for the full four year period covered by The Line of Beauty, even as he finishes studies and begins work with another Oxonian friend, the Lebanese Wani Ouradi. The Ouradis, who have made their massive fortune in grocery stores, are another side of a changing Britain. The father is made a lord, the son is sent to Harrow. While the father may be spoken of, behind his back, in terms of racism and dismissal, the same cannot be said for the son. Wani, through his integration into the boarding school system, has already become more British – in a way – than Nick could ever hope to be.

Nick’s relationship with Wani continues his upward social climb by providing the financial support needed to solidify – at least, for a time – the social benefits conferred by his friendship with the Feddens. Wani’s wealth is so great that at one point he gives Nick five thousand pounds just so Nick stops asking him to pay him for smaller things. By the end of the novel, Wani has given Nick plenty more. The reason for such generosity is not merely that they are friends or that Wani is rich, but rather that Wani and Nick are sexual partners. For, complicating the linear progression of the novel, from rags to riches, namelessness to front-page news, is the simple fact that Nick is gay. 

The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 legalised homosexual relations between consenting adults in the UK, but a law of the land is not a law of the mind, and Nick’s sexuality exists in an ambiguous field – tolerated, rather than quite accepted, by the novel’s characters. “They’re absolutely fine with it”, Nick says to his first boyfriend of the Feddens’ knowledge of his sexuality, then adds to himself – “as long as it’s never mentioned.” The tension is light enough that we may not notice it at first. Nick’s sexual self-discovery – for he was eventually “out” in Oxford, but remained a virgin nevertheless – seems to be linked with his other advances, all these positive things happening at once to him. In the first section of the novel, “The Love-Chord”, Nick’s romance with a young Black council worker is full of excitement and affection, as he’s initiated into the world of gay sex.  

When we jump to 1986 for the novel’s main section, this innocent discovery and pleasure at the world is already gone. Leo, the council worker, has vanished – we do not learn why until much later – to be replaced by Wani. Suddenly, Nick is addicted to cocaine – the one drug whose identity is so tightly bound to money and (apparent) worldly success, and which he does together with Wani. The sex, loving with Leo, has become somewhat sordid. Wani is a risk-taker who enjoys picking people up for threesomes and is addicted to pornography. It’s hard not to read this, within the novel, as a kind of decay. Just as the sexual and physical pleasures reach their peaks, the moral content of Nick’s life is emptying out. He is no longer studying, the relationship with Wani is totally secret, and he seems utterly directionless even as his money and status grow.

Through Gerald Fedden, Hollinghurst develops the idea of contrast further. Gerald is driven to grow his own power through his politics and his money through business. He is on the up. Yet his love for the prime minister – who is a constant background presence in the novel but is never named – is a point of tension when the man has a wife to give his attention to. For their silver wedding anniversary, Gerald and Rachel have a party where Thatcher attends, and we see quite clearly how he struggles to balance his desire to impress both women. Nick later discovers that Gerald’s family man appearance is at least in part an act, when he finds him and his secretary in a compromising position behind the scenes at a campaign event. 

The difference between illusion and reality is one of the clearest thematic oppositions of the novel. As in our own world, people live within one of their own imagining. Gerald has an admirer on his street called Geoffrey, who is convinced of Gerald’s merits until the crisis of the novel’s final section forces him to understand otherwise. The Ouradis believe, or wish to, that their son is not gay, and pay a young lady to pretend to be his girlfriend, and then fiancée, to maintain the illusion. The drugs consumed by the wealthy characters are also tools for the creation of another picture of reality, as the text shows by drawing repeated attention to the performance of Nick and Wani socially before and after they have visited the bathroom for a quick hit of cocaine. Being trapped within illusions is not, either, the sole prerogative of the rich. Leo brings Nick home to meet his mother, who staunchly refuses to believe that her son could be gay or that Nick could be anything other than a mere friend.

Illusions can remain solid, or become fragile and break. Rather than the sudden collapses at the novel’s end, the more interesting illusions are those that are slowly undermined as the novel progresses. We follow Nick throughout The Line of Beauty. It is his novel, his consciousness that we watch, his prejudices we live. His relationship with Leo, the council worker, is interesting in this regard for revealing the negative impacts upon the people he works with of Thatcher’s policies. Nick, however, chooses to ignore them, just as the Feddens choose to ignore the negative reputation of Gerald’s business partner until he has already been fleeced by him, and as the Conservative party chooses to ignore the Ouradis’ class and ethnic background while they can accept significant donations from them. We have a sense that while things are good, boundaries and identities can shift and be safely blurred. Unfortunately, as in life, the music soon stops.

The moral decay of the upper classes, drugs and sex and power in all their attraction and distraction and destruction – these are time-honoured things. Indeed, coinciding with my reading of The Line of Beauty I also plunged into the show Succession, about the succession crisis for the aging patriarch of a large US media conglomerate. Excellent also, the merging of themes in both works (illusion, drugs, lies) did make me uneasy as to why one might choose the novel over the show, besides the period colour of the Thatcher years and the prominence of gay sex in the book. Even the period of Succession’s filming (starting in 2018) has coincided with particularly poor moral performance of the United States, at least when viewed from across the pond, as the Thatcher years may be viewed today.

The answer has to be Hollinghurst’s language, and the filtering effect of Nick’s consciousness. Language is important here – Nick aims to become an expert on Henry James’s use of the stuff, after all. All of those classic tropes of fiction written in the shadow of class consciousness are here. Of Rachel Fedden we hear how Nick “loved the upper-class economy of her talk, her way of saying nothing except by hinted shades of agreement and disagreement.” When we read the dialogue of the novel we must be willing, as we might with a novel of the 19th century, to read the language as a dance of concealment and revelation, as when Catherine Fedden has a breakdown which must be suppressed by the language of the guests at a dinner: “an emotional young lady” says one, “a very emotional young lady” says another – empty phrases preferable to acknowledging an unpleasant fact.

The language of something like Succession is masterful, but in that case it is a mastery of swearing and comic insults rather than subtlety. One might be tempted to say this is a difference of temperament between American and British national characters, but it’s fairer, I think, to note the differences of the media. In television we have too much to work with – acting, backgrounds, music, action – so that language can be lost or become of secondary importance. The limitations of prose also serve to focus attention upon what it can do well, and the deliberateness of each choice of word and phrase. Prose also goes at our own pace, whereas television is propelled onwards unless we reach for the pause button – for this reason too, it seems to ask for a holistic appraisal, rather than close reading. Or close watching, I suppose.

Prose also allows for the theme of illusion to work better than it perhaps would in film or television. Nick’s illusions become our illusions, his evasions become our small opportunities to see what he refuses to notice. We see the Thatcherite years both as a bounteous becoming in the first part, then as a desperate attempt to enjoy things in the second part, before finally witnessing their collapse in the third part. Yet at the same time we can see the direction of travel, even as Nick avoids it: the presence of AIDs long before it is named, the prejudices against gays and foreigners that are neatly ignored so long as the money flows, the sense that not everyone is benefitting from the Conservative government.

This might just be so much guff from me, as usual. Especially as it only took two years from publication before there was a television adaptation of The Line of Beauty. Clearly the prose could live just as easily as spoken words, after all! It’s a good novel, well-made and well-written. To a certain extent, as an assassination of Britain’s ruling elite, it reminded me of the Patrick Melrose novels. But where Edward St Aubyn’s novels each take place over a continuous time period (with one exception), The Line of Beauty is more comfortable varying its scenes. This, to me, makes it seem technically more accomplished. I also amassed a staggering number of new words in the back of my copy, so clearly Hollinghurst has done a good job eating the dictionary.

I think what makes the novel worth reading is the way it manages to portray a very historically contested period without seeming overly partisan. Naturally, the rich are rude, prejudiced toffs, but that’s hardly news – indeed, I don’t think they would find that surprising either. They, (we?), would probably laugh at the accusation. Rather than focusing on either the suffering caused by Thatcher’s policies, or solely on the glamour, the novel shows it as a time of possibilities, good and bad. “I was lucky. And then I was… careful” – so speaks Nick of how he avoided contracting HIV. Just the same can be said of his experience of 1983-1987. Luck means that he comes out of the final pages rich in spite of his relatively lowly origins, with valuable knowledge gained at a painful price, but not one too hard to bear.

Yet we know that it could have been otherwise, that things are fragile. This is a valuable lesson, in our own turbulent times, as well.